All the Names They Used for God

Praise

“What an outstanding short story collection. I knew nothing about this book going in and was thrilled by each story. There is so much range here, and there is a nice fabulist edge to nearly all the stories. The writer wields so much confidence and control in her prose and, my goodness, what imagination, what passion there is in this work. From one story to the next I felt like the writer knows everything about everything.”—Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and Hunger

“Fuses science, myth, and imagination into a dark and gorgeous series of questions about our current predicaments.”—Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See

“Delightfully unexpected . . . The strange and wonderful stories that make up [Anjali] Sachdeva’s debut begin on this side of reality and slip to the other—often so gracefully, and with such a precise rendering of the fantastical, that we become inadvertent believers. ‘The World by Night’ plunges us into a cave beneath a prairie, where Sadie, an abandoned albino bride, finds herself seduced by a dark and glittering world populated by elusive creatures like herself. ‘Glass-Lung’ begins with a furnace accident in a Pennsylvania steel mill; its only survivor clings to life with the help of his eight-year-old daughter, who, in the kind of surprising shift typical of these stories, ends up working in a museum as the secretary to an archaeologist, then serving as the archaeologist’s assistant on a search for an Egyptian tomb. . . . The brilliance of these stories—beyond the cool, precise artistry of their prose—is their embrace of both the known and the unknown, in a combination that feels truly original.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Terrific . . . [Anjali] Sachdeva’s book, a debut, is notable for its exuberant variety. . . . The range of her gifts is best seen in the title story, about two young women who are forced to become child brides to Islamists but gradually turn the tables on their captors through the practice of mind control. . . . The story’s delicate sadness mingles beautifully with the boldness of its conception.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Each of these stories is a perfect diorama: scrupulously assembled, complex, unsettling. Completing one is like having lived an entire life, and then being born, breathless, into another.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties

“Emotionally scorching . . . artfully deployed . . . a wide-ranging collection of stories that are a blend of fact and fiction, seamlessly integrating magical realism and the firmly earthbound . . . a strong collection from start to finish.”—BookPage

“[A] striking debut short story collection . . . enchanting and mesmerizing . . . Sachdeva’s writing is carefully textured and nuanced. . . . Reminiscent of Aimee Bender’s and Kelly Link’s excellent speculative works.”—PopMatters

“Sachdeva’s stories almost seem to revel in their diversity; the book has surprises on virtually every page and touches on a host of philosophical and technological questions. . . . Science fiction has always been at its strongest when working exactly this kind of combination, and Sachdeva’s first attempts at it are remarkable.”—The Christian Science Monitor